1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for displaying an image in a portable terminal, and in particular, to an apparatus and method for displaying an image whereby a user waiting time is reduced by separately performing a decoding operation from a user interface operation and whereby an image quality is improved by first displaying an enlarged thumbnail of an original image and then subsequently displaying the original image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, portable terminals such as mobile phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) have become widely used. The portable terminals are generally used for telephone calls or schedule management. In addition, the portable terminals are also used for many other purposes. For example, still pictures or videos can be captured by using a digital camera included in a portable terminal. Further, the portable terminal provides a variety of functions such as watching a satellite broadcasting program, text editing, playing games, using a navigation function, listening to music, sending/receiving Short Message Service (SMS) messages, and transmitting/receiving a multimedia message attached with a captured still image or moving image.
In particular, with the development of a camera function and a display function, an image can be captured and displayed with a high resolution. To further this trend, a method of displaying an image in a portable terminal has been developed.
Conventionally, a high-resolution image is compressed before storing the image in a memory of a portable terminal. The compressed image may be decoded before being displayed on a display unit of the portable terminal. However, since the portable terminal generally has a small-sized display unit, before being displayed on the display unit, the decoded image is subject to an image size reduction process so that the size of the decoded image fits the screen of the small-sized display unit.
Since the image size reduction process has to be performed after the decoding process, the conventional method is time consuming and uses extra memory space. To address this problem, a relatively small-sized thumbnail is first displayed according to a predefined compression rule, and an original image of the thumbnail is decoded only when a user requests a high-resolution image. As a result of a decoding, the original image is enlarged to its maximum size and thereafter is stored in a memory. When displayed on the display unit, the decoded original image is resized to a requested image size.
However, a problem still remains in that a lot of time is required to decode the original image. Further, during the decoding process, the portable terminal cannot perform other tasks. Thus, a user command cannot be received while the decoding process is performed.